"I think that's a mistake," said Combs. "Nearly every fish you lose can teach you something. Certainly, sometimes you won't be able to figure out why you lost a particular fish, but you'll be surprised at how often you can fix the problem.
"It could be mechanical. It could be your rod, reel or line. It could be your bait selection or the color you used. Going through that mental checklist can be a useful process, and by employing it over the past five years, I've really cut down on the number of fish that I lose. Of course, I still lose some, but usually I'm able to correct the mistake and minimize the losses."
During a big bass tournament on Sam Rayburn, Combs was fishing a chartreuse and blue 6XD and dodged a bullet several times, barely landing fish that were poorly hooked. Later in the day, he lost one of more than 8 pounds, and his initial feeling was that it was going to cost him a big paycheck. Luckily, though, he still managed to win, but the losses ate at him.
Two days later, he went out there with the same crankbait in a shad pattern, and they were "absolutely choking it." Basking in the glow of his win, it would've been easy to dismiss the losses by saying, "That's just fishing," but by analyzing and correcting his mistake, he put together another piece of the puzzle, which he felt would help him down the line.
Said Combs, "I wish I had had this attitude early in my career, particularly when it came to rod selection. Matching your rod to your bait is such a big deal. The same rod that you use to take up a lot of slack at the end of a cast with a single-hooked lure is usually entirely wrong for making a long cast with a crankbait, but I didn't fully understand how those subtleties affected my effectiveness. It wasn't until a friend and I went out to test some new rods, flipping deep hydrilla in 15 to 18 feet of water, that I realized that fact.
"We thought we had the right rod, but at one point, it became evident that something was wrong, because we lost about 10 fish in a row," explained Combs. "Then we decided to switch rods, and after that, we never lost another fish. It wasn't a major change...just a half power or so...but that made all the difference.
"Just as I've learned about the importance of rod action and power, all of my time guiding on Falcon taught me a lot about selecting the right hook for a particular application. I spent a lot of time cranking there, and I learned that, while there are a lot of sharp trebles, there aren't a lot of strong ones. Those big fish would jump, the bait would rattle back and forth, and they'd send it flying back at me with a straightened hook. When I figured out the right hook for each bait, those losses went way down. It was no longer a matter of 'losing a few as part of the game.'"
Combs learned yet another lesson when the vibrating jig craze first started. He jumped on the bandwagon, figuring that he could fish it on the same rod he used for spinnerbaits. Those early days with the Strike King Pure Poison were painful because he was losing a ton of fish, and simply didn't have the confidence to use it on a tournament day.
"I could've chalked it up to being the nature of the bait," he said, "but another very talented angler discussed it with me and said that the rod I was using was way too stiff. Rather than thinking of the Pure Poison as a spinnerbait substitute, I had to think of it more like a crankbait. With the stiff rod, I was literally pulling the lure away from the fish. With one simple change, and a little bit of time relearning the technique, it became one of my confidence lures. I earned four or five top 10s on it afterward, and I no longer worried about losing fish.
"The bottom line is that it's unproductive to settle for 'losing just a few,'" continued Combs. "When you're completely dialed in, you'll lose very few. With a little bit of analysis and experimentation, you'll be surprised at how quickly you can minimize the losses that you previously accepted as part of the game."
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